First complete sauropod embryo found after spending decades on the shelf

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

This is interesting - it turns out that a Soviet expedition from the 1960s that included a number of items that were shelved for decades actually found a complete sauropod embryo, that was only discovered now thanks to scanning electron microscopy and neutron tomography. One of the books I read the most while young was this one:


which was about the life of an apatosaurus (then called a brontosaurus) beginning with its time as a baby as it hatched and ran away from tiny predators (some of her siblings didn't survive that), and then further on as other brothers and sisters either were killed or moved away, finally leaving us with the main character as a fully-grown adult, who then becomes a mother and lives to a ripe old age with the formerly ferocious predators just tiny gnats in comparison with her now huge body. So actually having a complete specimen of a sauropod inside an egg is a nice touch to our understanding of their life cycle.

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